Folding the Sky
by Halia
Summary: A twenty six-year-old rookie Agent Sands is being relocated from Colorado to Mexico with his new and unwanted partner. They face challenges in snagging a mysterious enemy, while Sands attempts to wrestle his inner demons in unfamiliar territory. R&RLove.


Folding the Sky  
  
Summary: A twenty six-year-old rookie Agent Sands is being relocated from Colorado to Mexico with his new and unwanted partner. They face challenges in snagging a mysterious enemy, while Sands attempts to wrestle his inner demons in a new land.  
  
x x x x x  
  
Sands awoke.  
  
His body jerked and he felt his tongue slide up between his lips and then retreat into the cavern of his hot mouth. His heart was pounding in his chest and he took deep and even breaths, waiting for the cold night of reality to pool around him. His eyes opened.  
  
He glanced at the alarm clock by his bed. 3:38 am.  
  
"Fuck," he whispered to himself. He pressed his hands over his face and took a long sigh, then looked back at the clock helplessly.  
  
He'd had a nightmare; a bad one.  
  
He dreamt of his mother, Vanessa, or Nessa, as he called her. For some reason it never seemed natural to call her 'mom.' He thought the gesture was pointless and stupid. Nessa didn't seem to mind.  
  
She was wigged-out, he could remember that. A hippie. She took Sands with her as she traveled endlessly on the road with her groupies in a purple van. Some nights they would pull over, and Sands would sit on his mother's lap as the guys built a campfire and they sang songs all night. His mother would play the guitar.  
  
He remembered her guitar--mainly how it smelled. Like cinnamon pressed with jasmine and tobacco. She would take his hand and guide it along the frets and tell him where to press his fingers, and then she would sing in his ear, in her soft, strong voice. She sounded a bit like Joan Baez, he thought.  
  
In his dream, his mother was sitting in front of a campfire in a deserted wasteland, surrounded by her friends from the road, who Sands could scarcely remember. Sands was fully-grown yet still sitting on her lap. She was singing the song 'Farewell Angelina,' throwing her head back with her eyes closed, and she swayed her neck back and forth. A hippie thing, Sands guessed.  
  
She reached behind her and out of nowhere came the honey-colored guitar. She pushed it up against Sands's torso, and he could feel the weight of it pressing down on his skin. She took his fingers and wrapped them over the frets, but he stared in shock as he looked down: as his hand went down on the strings blood began to seep through them and drip down the neck of the guitar.  
  
He felt her tug on his wrist and slide his hand up and down, and he could feel the tips of his fingers slicing open along the strings as if they were the edges of knives. She continued to sing in his ear. Her voice became a whisper simply reciting the last verse of the song:  
  
The machine guns are roaring  
  
The puppets heave rocks  
  
The fiends nail time bombs  
  
To the hands of the clocks  
  
Call me any name you like  
  
I will never deny it  
  
Farewell Angelina  
  
The sky is erupting  
  
I must go where it's quiet...  
  
Sands shook himself out of his post-slumber trance. He threw his legs off his bed and lit a cigarette, and trudged out the door onto the porch clinging to the side of the house.  
  
It was chilly, and the rain came down in a silky mist that blanketed the black mountains. There were millions of stars piercing the sky. Sands looked up at them and let out a steady blue stream of smoke from his lips.  
  
Sands liked Colorado. He missed New York, especially this time of year, but he dealt with it pretty easily.  
  
He'd manage to scrape enough money to buy a cabin in the mountains. He thought it would have been valuable property, but not many people bought houses where he lived--too many bears.  
  
But Sands loved the bears. Good target practice.  
  
He didn't feel like going back to sleep. He looked down at the large river that hissed through the murky woods beneath his high porch and felt like jumping in, to feel the sensation of falling and then his body smashing into the roaring rocks 60 feet below him.  
  
He looked back up at the moon. Tonight, its rotation was his favorite--the little sliver. He had no idea of the scientific term, but the moon was just a thin fingernail in the sky. It reminded him of the Cheshire Cat's smile.  
  
Sands let out his own smile. Farewell, Angelina, the sky is erupting...  
  
What a strange dream, he thought to himself. Strange, strange dream.  
  
And of all nights, too--why had he dreamt of Nessa? And Farewell, Angelina...  
  
Angelina Kiss.  
  
Oh, fuck. That's right.  
  
Sands was leaving for Mexico in the morning.  
  
Mexico, from what he'd heard, sounded like Sands's ultimate nightmare. He hated the heat, he hated the music, and he hated the food. He was all- American, and darn-tootin' proud of it, too. This was the last thing he wanted, and with the way things had been going lately, the last thing he could handle.  
  
The CIA, or "The A" as Sands called it, was relocating Sands on account of what they called "unsettling behavior."  
  
"You hate me that much, huh?" asked Sands with a quiet smirk on his face two weeks before.  
  
"Oh, come on, Sheldon. Enough with the bullshit," said Walter Tumult, one of Sands's four main bosses. Sands sat in one of the two large armchairs in front of the desk, while Walter sat behind in a swivel chair. Sands took enough time to look at the framed pictures of Walter's daughter, Sherry, who was 7 or 8 years old. Walter had brought her to work one day, and she seemed particularly interested in Sands's cowboy hat that he liked to wear. She was hit by a car three months later and killed instantly.  
  
"What bullshit?" Sands was still smiling. "You obviously don't want me here, Walt. Neither you nor anybody else. You think I'm a lunatic. A deranged fascist pent on converting the world to Nazism and gassing all the children. But hark, a solution arises! Would you look at that? Crimes need a-solving in Mexico. Let's get Sands in there quick as possible. Hell, I bet you'd even send me to Beijing if we had business there. You just want me gone, don't you?"  
  
"That's not true," muttered Walter briskly. "You're one of the best we've got, Sands. I think you know that yourself. But let's just face facts here: you don't get along with people. You're not a people-person. You're a loner. I think you'd be happier away from all this crap in the States."  
  
"So you're sending me away? First from New York, then from DC, and now from Colorado?" He paused and let out a cold laugh. "Man, you're a piece of shit." He stood up and started for the door until Walter's voice halted him.  
  
"You won't be alone. Not completely alone."  
  
Sands turned. "Oh?"  
  
"You've got a new partner, Sands. Hopefully this one will work out better than the last."  
  
"Yeah, hopefully I won't end up killing them this time."  
  
Walt's eyebrows rose and he gave Sands a stern look. "Don't push it."  
  
"I don't need a fucking partner," hissed Sands, slipping his jacket over his shoulders preparing to leave the office. "I'm a loner, like you said."  
  
"You can't get shipped off to another country when you don't even speak Spanish," Walt said. "Plus, this assignment is too tough for one guy to handle."  
  
"Oh, yeah? What's his name?"  
  
"Her name is Angelina. Angelina Kiss. You'll meet her at the airport before your flight takes off."  
  
"I don't fucking believe this," breathed Sands. "I don't fucking believe this."  
  
He left the office and slammed the door behind him.  
  
And now here he was, on his porch, two weeks later, alone, standing only with the river and the black sky.  
  
He slid open the glass door and wandered into the kitchen, not bothering to close the door behind him, and stared his case file lying on the table, next to the pile of napkins and the salt & pepper shakers. He hadn't looked at it yet.  
  
The word "Confidential" was slapped across the front of the folder in a dry stamp print. To Sands, these things felt like movie props. Things that the Bond guys thought up and then the real agencies took the idea right out of the movies.  
  
He lifted the front flap, and very neatly were white sheets secured with a single paper clip, lots of the usual federal jabber typed on each page.  
  
He'd tried to read it a bunch of times, but he hadn't had his reading glasses tucked away in his pocket, and he was always to lazy to go fetch them, so he would just put it off.  
  
Of course, he hadn't kept his glasses in his pajamas, but now was as good a time as ever. He carried the file into his bedroom and plucked his glasses off the nightstand, propped his pillows up and turned on the light, then began to read.  
  
Sands was to investigate a series or reports which stated claims of child slavery, pimping, and most importantly, the selling/trading of narcotics. It didn't sound much different than his other cases, though he'd only been assigned to two, except this one was in a new land; in Mexico.  
  
Sands had a gut feeling his superiors were only re-locating him to get him out of their hair. He was a thorn in a lot of sides, one that needed immediate plucking, especially after his mishap with his previous partner.  
  
Sands had killed him. He'd lost his temper and put a fucking bullet in the guy's head.  
  
Of course, the agency kept this all very hush-hush. They knew Sands was good. So good, in fact, that they just couldn't afford to lose him. A couple of calls were made, and that was that.  
  
But he still had to go. He still had to fucking go.  
  
Sands sighed and didn't feel like finishing the rest of the report. He removed his glasses and set the file down on the table, looked out the window. It wasn't drizzling anymore. He remained staring outside, as if waiting for something to happen, until his eyes finally closed and he slept for a few hours.  
  
x x x x x  
  
Sands woke up around six, made coffee, and sat out on the porch wearing only his plaid cotton bathrobe and combat boots. He heard the patterned hooting of the Mourning Doves, sniffed the fresh dew and cold pine. The air was cool and the sun was the color of blood. For a few moments he just listened, watched, smelled. Then he stood up, rinsed his coffee cup, got dressed, took his bag and went out the door.  
  
Sands would never come home again.  
  
x x x x x  
  
More coming soon; hope you've enjoyed so far. Please tell me what you think! 


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